My brother and I are separated by 17 months, which allows me to say that I am the only one of us who was alive for the Orioles’ last World Championship, the release of Murmur, and the beginning of the Nintendo generation. My brother points out that I am statistically likely to die before him, which somewhat tempers my enthusiasm on those points. We are close enough in age to have become the best of friends and the bitterest of enemies, depending on any number of household disputes. I told him that he was conceived so soon after my birth because my parents wanted to strike while the iron was so clearly hot. He claimed they were trying to erase their mistake by issuing a superior replacement. That debate has not yet been decided, with our parents’ refusal to disclose the answer.
Still, we spent a lot of time together, mostly voluntarily. We developed teams on Baseball Stars, and then waged war on each other with them, my favorite players against his. Eventually, one of us would lose enough games in a row and reset the system in entirely the wrong way, destroying all the work we had saved up until that point. A few hours later, we were back to playing against the American Dreams and Lovely Ladies to build new armies of pre-steroids supermen.
We invented games to play when organized leagues had nothing scheduled. These tended more towards the simple, like “Throw the Ball at the Side of the House without Breaking a Window: The Game,” but, occasionally, when truly inspired, we would construct something of pure genius like “HockeySoccerBroomball.” HoSoBr came with its own stadium (my grandmother’s basement), equipment (dodge ball, brooms and a chair turned to create a perfectly sized goal) and rule book (illustrated by my brother and written by yours truly).
At night, we fought to the death (or until my parents came in and told us to stop) with stuffed animals. My position on the upper bunk provided me with the strategic high ground, but in the dark, his quick sneak attacks and superior firepower usually gained him the advantage. When my parents converted our childhood bedroom into a den last year, they found plastic shards of eyes, noses and buttons in every corner, and the saddest-looking lot of plush toys in history.
My favorite times, however, were the weekends we spent roaming local malls and hotel conference rooms, searching for our favorite players on cardboard. I chased the local hero and paid the premium necessary to do so, while my brother collected two Wade Boggs’ cards for every Ripken I could get my hands on. My dad taught me probability by allowing me to play rigged dice games, in repeatedly failed efforts to win an ’82 Topps #21. My brother helped me cut the grass for two weeks and was swimming in Boggs’ rookies. I hated him a little bit. At the time, I comforted myself with the thought that my brother had backed the wrong horse, or horseman as it later turned out.
Ripken and Boggs were near perfect contemporaries, each playing their first full season in 1982. Ripken changed his position, proving that a shortstop could be big, a good hitter who didn’t sacrifice the necessary glove. He won the Rookie of the Year in 1982, the MVP in 1983 and 1991 and endless credit for saving baseball after its suicidal strike, just because he showed up to work everyday and seemed to genuinely appreciate how lucky he was. He earned countless fans with this combination of superior production and squeaky-clean everyman image, an image he still profits from in business ventures and commercials.
Boggs never got that far, unless you consider “Hair Club for Men” commercials as true artistic achievements. He lost the Rookie of the Year race to Ripken (and Kent Hrbek) and never placed higher than 4th in MVP voting. While Ripken was getting credit for playing every single game and cashing in on it, Boggs was getting nicknames for eating chicken before every game, public admonishment for an extra-marital affair and a bizarre sort of fan following for a mythical airplane trip that may or may not have been sponsored by Miller Lite.
Still, by any reasonable examination, Wade Boggs was as good a player, if not better. He never had a season as sublime as Ripken’s 1991, and he never played a premium defensive position, but he was a clearly superior hitter to Ripken throughout their careers and an underrated gloveman. He led the league in OBP six times and OPS twice, despite having only five homeruns in one of those years. The Gold Glove voters recognized him once he moved to NY, but, as usual, they were a few years late. In simple advanced stat form: Boggs has BRAA/FRAA/WARP1 lines of 588/133/110.4 at 3B; Ripken’s are 332/100/107.7 at SS/3B. The difference in their reputations can probably be best summed up in the following chart of the public’s preferences:
The Streak >>>>> Margo Adams
HRs > 2Bs + BBs
Running a lap around the stadium without help > Needing a horse
My brother and I were not contemporaries, at least not in the way that matters for kids. I was two grades ahead of him, and though we had the same teachers, were largely on the same academic track, and even chose the same foreign language (German) to learn, I always had first crack at making the first impression. I did not do well by my brother.
I was a very good student. I easily pulled A’s, and high test scores more than overcame my refusal to do homework, especially after I made a small name for myself in high school by acing a couple of national standardized tests. Teachers didn’t hold me to the same standards as everyone else, and I knew it. Shockingly, this freedom from criticism turned a socially maladjusted high school kid into something that could best be described by any random four-letter word. Eventually, college came and the mixture of new friends willing to crush my ego and the very brutal realization I wasn’t the smartest person ever settled me down.
I had, however, done the necessary damage. I burned bridges that my brother had no hopes of crossing safely, and he ended up paying for many of my mistakes. Teachers I walked over gunned for him, and his grades occasionally failed to reflect his natural intelligence or hard work. Somehow, he kept a level head, accepted these unearned losses like Matt Cain and soldiered on. Despite being just as talented as me in most ways (and more so in others), he left high school a slightly above average student with decent potential.
People say a lot of things about time: it heals all wounds; it waits for no man; for the very cynical, it wastes us as we waste it. For me, more than anything else, time smoothes.
Thanks to time, rough edges become fuzzy and then disappear altogether, the background noise is effectively washed out, and when we look back, we can see only the substantive body of a thing. We lose some notable pieces of information and context can more easily be stripped away, but we simultaneously gain perspective and lose the bias born of temporal and geographic closeness.
So much of the work done in modern baseball analysis fights against this smoothing, making praise for time’s obfuscation tantamount to blasphemy. We yearn to beat back time, find those niches where distinction exists, and draw it out of its shady refuge. We want to know what really differentiates Jesse Haines from Urban Shocker, and judging from recent SABR emails I’ve received, we want to know it intensely. We start fights over method, and continue them over results. Decisive language is met with thinly veiled antagonism and tiny differences swallow the larger picture.
Sometimes, though, I just want the larger picture. Sometimes, I just want to know if Haines and Shocker were good pitchers, not argue ad nauseam because someone put one of them in the Hall of Fame nearly a half-century ago. Sometimes, it’s enough to know that Cal Ripken and Wade Boggs were both great players; that their differences in style, position, and public acceptance can be fuzzed over by their nearly equal contributions on the field; that you probably couldn’t go wrong with either of them.
I live in Wilmington, DE now, with a wife, a mortgage, and two cats who largely detest humans. My brother moved here to work for DuPont, and has parlayed his success there and in college into a chance to do grad work at Princeton in the fall. We hang out and talk about Baseball Stars or how dangerous our bedroom could be. Sometimes, it’s just nice to appreciate that we both ended up OK, no matter the path taken to get there.
*This article was inspired, in part, by this
piece.